Smooth Talker: Trail of Death, page 2
Word of Andrews’ murder spread like wildfire through Napa. But who would have done such a thing to the popular bartender? And what happened to her Cadillac, which had disappeared along with her purse?
Blood splatter evidence from the Andrews murder scene. Photo courtesy of the Napa County District Attorney’s Office.
Answering those questions was tasked to Napa police detectives John Bailey and Robert Jarecki. Thanks to Luce, suspicion immediately centered on the flirtatious man at the end of the bar. But who was he?
Luce and his two friends told police he was a stranger and they’d never seen him before. Just a drifter. But others thought the description of the suspect sounded like a welder Anita knew. And still others thought it described the boyfriend who worked for the carnival.
As the detectives chased each lead, they were unaware that the drifter-welder-carnival worker might all be one and the same man. This was in part because Andrews’ daughter, Donna Hawkins, didn’t tell them about the last time she’d talked to her mother on the telephone.
Hawkins, 23 years old and living in Walnut Creek about twenty-five miles away, had spoken to Andrews a week earlier when Hawkins called to a cancel a dinner date. During the conversation, her mom said she was fed up with her sometimes boyfriend, a mechanic who worked for a traveling carnival. Anita said he’d run up a $400 telephone bill at her apartment. He’d left his tools in the back of her Cadillac, but she wasn’t giving them back until he paid her.
In addition to the telephone call between Andrews and Hawkins, the aftermath surrounding the murder of Anita Andrews was filled with other what-ifs. What if the night patrolman hadn’t missed his pass by the bar and noticed that the padlock was missing on the door but the Cadillac was gone? He might have discovered Andrews’ body many hours earlier and, perhaps, the killer wouldn’t have had such a head start.
And Andrews’ former neighbor, Joseph Silva, who was supposed to go out to dinner with her the night before, wondered what if he’d stopped by for a drink. He may have stayed and escorted Anita to her car, or discouraged the killer just with his presence. But he hadn’t and it haunted him. As the investigation wore on without any apparent progress, he and a friend even checked out the parking lots at the Oakland and San Francisco airports looking for her Cadillac.
Bailey and Jarecki canvassed the neighborhood, asking if anybody had noticed anything, or anyone unusual. They scoured records of other rapes, robberies and murders to see if they could find anything that look similar to what happened at Fagiani’s.
They came up with one name, Liston Beal. He’d checked into the Connor Hotel on July 10 and then checked out the next morning and left town. The hotel manager thought Beal had been acting weird when he checked out.
Even Luce and his friends were potential suspects. They’d been at the bar. Maybe they’d made up the stranger to cover themselves. But their stories checked out.
There was so little to go on. Those were the days before computers would make it easier for law enforcement agencies to share or receive information, so it was a month before the Napa detectives learned there was a hit on Andrews’ credit card. Sometime before midnight on the night of the murder, a tan Cadillac pulled into a Sacramento truck stop off Highway 99, sixty miles northwest of Napa.
Paul Griener was the attendant on duty when the driver asked politely for ten dollars worth of gas. As he filled the tank, the 36-year-old Griener noticed a purse on the back seat and that the driver had covered his lap with a blue towel that appeared to be stained with blood. Why the towel, he thought and considered asking. But the driver didn’t seem nervous; in fact, he would describe the driver to police as “calm, cool and collected.”
So Griener let it go. Nor did he balk when the driver gave him a credit card with a woman’s name on it. The man said it was his wife’s card and signed it “A.E. Andrews” before pulling out and heading south.[1]
However, where the driver went was anybody’s guess. The Cadillac disappeared and never would be located.
After nearly two months of intense investigation, the Napa detectives had to admit that the case had gone stone cold dead. The evidence—a few bottles with fingerprints they couldn’t match to anyone, a cigarette butt from the ashtray, broken glass from the bottle she’d been struck with, a towel the killer left on the floor of the storeroom, the murder weapon, a copy of the gas station receipt from Sacramento, and some photographs—was stored to await a break in the case.
[1] Sam Whiting, “Napa Bar Is a Reminder of Old Murder,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 17, 1989
III
August 30, 1974
Six weeks later after the murder of Anita Andrews and 1100 miles to the east, Michele Wallace was trudging down a gravel road beneath a backpack containing her sleeping bag, camping equipment, and her most prized possession, a 35 mm camera. Okie, her black, German shepherd dog, paced alongside laden with his own saddle pack. The 25-year-old woman was returning from a Labor Day weekend of hiking in a mountainous area of south-central Colorado known as Schofield Park.
As she walked, she must have had mixed feelings: a little melancholy, perhaps, about her plans to soon leave the mountains she loved, but also excited about the future. Earlier that summer, she had driven from South Carolina, where she had been photographing a rare bird species on the remote barrier islands, to her hometown of Chicago for her brother George Jr.’s wedding. There she regaled her family and friends, such as her best friend Donna Campeglia, with tales of her latest adventure—camping in the marshlands for a week waiting for a nest of eggs to hatch, covering the lower portions of her legs with tin cans as an improvised defense against rattlesnakes.
“She’s got more balls than I ever had,’’ her father, George Sr., remarked to his wife, Maggie, as they shook their heads and laughed over Michele’s escapades.
At 5-feet-6 and 120 pounds, and much stronger than she appeared though a recent broken collarbone still bothered her. She seemed fearless to her friends and family. She’d once taken a job exercising polo ponies for a Chicago club, dashing full tilt across the fields. Later, she worked on a ranch, helping castrate young bulls at roundup time. She took up rock climbing and tried skydiving. She enrolled in martial arts classes. There was nothing a boy could do, her father boasted to friends, that she couldn’t.
In her mid-20s, Michele was also a beautiful young woman, with rich chocolate eyes and delicate features. She often wore her long, dark hair in two thick braids.
Michele Wallace was 25 years old when she disappeared. Photo courtesy of Donna Campeglia.
At her brother’s wedding, Michele told her parents that she would be moving on to Colorado to spend the rest of the summer taking photographs of the Rocky Mountains. Then in the fall, she would return to North Carolina for her first professional photography assignment, chronicling the lives of the people who lived deep in the mountains there.
It was an isolated, backward world where moonshiners still plied their trade and the locals mistrusted strangers, she said, but she wasn’t worried about her own safety. Highways and housing developments were pushing ever closer to their homes, and soon the hill people would be carried away by the tide of civilization. She wanted to make a record “before they’re gone.” Her idea was good enough to win her a government grant, but first she wanted to spend the summer in the mountains of Colorado.
So Michele moved to Gunnison, a small town with about 3,500 residents, in Gunnison County. It wasn’t hard to see why: The town was surrounded by some of the most beautiful and rugged country in all of Colorado. It was set in a wide valley through which the Gunnison River flowed. The valley floor was covered with miles of scrubby, knee-high brush and stunted juniper trees interspersed with the cultivated fields of working ranches. Enormous cottonwood trees lined the banks of the river.
In the mountains, however, the landscape changed dramatically. Rangeland and cottonwoods gave way to steep, rocky slopes blanketed by forests thick with pine, fir, and groves of quaking aspen. The area was a Mecca for fishermen and hunters, who every fall more than doubled Gunnison County’s population as they traipsed about the hills dressed in fluorescent orange. It was also a magnet for young people drawn to the area’s outdoor recreational activities, including nearby Crested Butte ski area, 28 miles north of Gunnison.
Michele fit right in with the outdoor enthusiasts. She was well liked if somewhat quiet. A few of her acquaintances later said they thought of her as lonely, or lost, as if constantly searching for something. But their perceptions may have been clouded by hindsight because in 1974, Michele Wallace had her whole life to look forward to. Her parents had bought her the red 1973 Mazda station wagon with the South Carolina license plates, and her father paid for the insurance. Otherwise she supported herself that summer by working as a flagger for a highway construction crew.
It was how she met her roommate, Theresa Erikson, another flagger. The two young women and Okie moved into a house that had been converted into apartments across the street from the Gunnison County courthouse.
Michele had acquired the dog, named for the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia, fully grown a year earlier. He was something of an enigma; he could be fiercely protective of his mistress or docile as a lamb. If young men came to visit, Okie usually went berserk. The girls had to chain him in the backyard or lock him in the kitchen, where he would continue to snarl and try to get back to Michele for as long as the visitor remained. When Michele visited her family in Chicago for her brother’s wedding, he bristled if her father gave her a hug. However, when Michele and Okie visited the home of Theresa’s parents in Montrose, some forty miles west of Gunnison, the dog took to Theresa’s father like an old friend.
Near the end of August, Michele called her mother. Theresa was going out of town to a wedding, and Michele had decided to take a backpacking trip. It would be her last chance before she left for North Carolina. Michele informed her mother that she was leaving on the twenty-seventh. She said she might not return until September 2, but not to worry; she was taking Okie with her and would be careful. “I’ll call you as soon as I get back,” she promised.
Some parents might have worried, but the Wallaces believed that their daughter knew how to take care of herself. Michele was well aware that the mountains could be dangerous, especially for someone alone and beyond help in case of an accident. She minimized the risks by letting people know where she was going, as well as when she expected to get back. She also had top-flight camping equipment and a large dog for protection.
Michele had a number of nearby areas to choose from for her trip. Fate, however, took her to Schofield Park, another ten miles beyond Crested Butte. Arriving in the area, she parked her car near the town of Gothic, a biological research station inhabited by only a few people, and walked a mile or so up the road to where a hiking trail began. She spent the next three days hiking and taking photographs: photographs of the mountains; photographs of Okie with his red dog pack; photographs of wildflowers and mountain wildlife.
On the fourth day, August 30, a Friday, Michele decided she was ready to return to Gunnison and, in a few short weeks, get on with the rest of her life. She packed her gear, settled Okie’s pack on him, and strapped into her own for the march back to her car.
Michele’s dog, Okie, was shot by a rancher after her disappearance. Photo taken by Michele Wallace
It was late afternoon when she reached the trailhead and the road to Gothic. As she left the trail, a beat-up car came wheezing up to her and stopped. Two men were inside. The driver offered her a beer.
Hot and grubby from her days in the mountains, Michele smiled and reached for the offered bottle. Not much of a drinker, she took only a sip before handing it back.
“We’re only going up the road a bit and will be back in a few minutes if you want a ride,” the driver told her.
“That’d be great,” she said and waved as they chugged off.
A few minutes later, the men were back. A tire was going flat, they said, but they would probably make it to Gothic if she still wanted a ride. Michelle and Okie jumped in the back.
They had hardly gone a hundred yards when there was a loud clang. The driver got out and looked under the car. He got back in proclaiming it just wasn’t his day; a rock had punched a hole in his oil pan. They all laughed. “How about I give you a ride when we get to Gothic?” Michele offered.
When they reached her car, the driver of the other vehicle got in the backseat with Okie. He looked like a ranch hand, tanned and weathered beyond his years. “I’m Chuck,” he said.
“And I’m Roy,” the other man added as he climbed in. He was the taller of the two and not bad-looking, even if his dishwater blond hair was thinning as he approached middle age. He smiled and shut the door, and said, “Thanks for the lift.”
On the way back to Gunnison, Chuck made friends with the dog, who licked his face and then drooled on his lap for most of the trip. Roy and the girl were talking up front, but he couldn’t hear much of what was said.
It was early evening when they arrived back in Gunnison outside the Columbine Bar. Chuck was surprised to hear Roy ask the girl if she would mind driving him a few blocks to his truck.
That’s strange, Chuck thought; I didn’t know he had a truck.” They’d been driving around, goofing off and boozing it up mostly, in his old rattletrap for two days since meeting in the Columbine. He thought about not letting the girl go off alone with Roy, but whiskey called so he decided he needed a drink more than he needed to be chivalrous.
Roy stepped out of the car to let Chuck exit. “I’ll be back in a bit,” he said to his confused drinking buddy; then he got back in the girl’s car. It would several weeks before the two men would see each other again and under much different circumstances.
Michele Wallace, on the other hand, was never seen alive again.[1]
[1] Steve Jackson, No Stone Unturned (WildBluePress, May 2015), Kindle Edition
IV
September 2, 1974
The fear in Margaret Wallace’s voice was palpable. “Have you heard from Michele,” she asked. “She always calls on Sunday, but she didn’t call. And now it’s Monday.”
Donna Campeglia didn’t know quite how to respond. Her best friend, her spiritual twin, Michele Wallace was living in Gunnison, Colorado, a long ways from Riverside, Illinois and they hadn’t talked in a month. They mostly wrote letters and the last she’d heard Michele was excited to be living in the mountains and happy to have a job working for a highway crew.
It was unusual for Michele to miss her weekly check in with her mother. Still, Donna wasn’t terribly alarmed; her friend tended to march to her own drummer and there were all sorts of plausible reasons she’d missed her call. For instance, Michele was always trekking around in the mountains with her dog, she could have met up with some other campers and decided to spend an extra couple of days exploring. Or maybe she was dating a new guy and was head-over-heels and not thinking about needing to call her mom. Or, well to be honest, Michele could be something of a “space cadet” and just forgot.
Other than her mom, nobody knew Michele better than Donna. They met when they were 13 years old in the girls’ bathroom at Riverside Middle School as they were applying fresh mascara side-by-side at the mirror. It was ironic that Michele who would come to epitomize the Earth Mother-type, applied makeup when she was a teenager as though her life depended on it. “I have to go apply the plastic surgery,” she’d say and away they’d head for the mirrors.
From the day they met, they were rarely apart. The two girls looked alike with soulful brown eyes and dark hair. Their birthdays were six days apart—Michele’s was April 13 and Donna’s the 19th—and kindred spirits. Donna was more gregarious, while Michele was content with Donna’s friendship and that of their other best friend, Kathy Pransky. But with Donna driving, Michele was always up for an adventure or a party as long as they were together. She was what Donna’s thought of as “a real Good-Time Charlie,” always smiling, always joking, rarely serious.
They lived in a community where nothing bad ever happened; at least not of the criminal sort. Donna and her parents were in Riverside, a designed community known for its many parks and winding tree-lined streets. Michele, her parents, and brother George Jr. lived in North Riverside which wasn’t quite as fairytale-like but she was right across the street from a forest preserve where she’d walk her dog—she always had a dog—without fear any time of the day or night.
After high school, Michele had been off to see the world while Donna got a job. Over the next few years, they’d see each other when Michele came home from wherever she had been living—Spain, Utah, or beloved mountains in Colorado. Or Donna would go see her. When Donna began vagabonding herself and went to live in Florida for a little while, “Mush” as she was known to family and friends, visited her. And in between they wrote dozens of letters.
There was something unsettled about Michele, as though she was always searching for something. Once when Donna was visiting her friend in Aspen, Colorado, Michele’s boyfriend, a Frenchman named Gerard summed it up. “Michele you are never present,” he said. “When you’re eating you’re thinking of going for a walk; when you’re walking you’re thinking of being somewhere else. You’re always dreaming of something.”
Such comments didn’t bother Michele. She’d just smile and go on dreaming.
The hardest part about visiting her for Donna was when they had to part. It was always a scene with both of them in tears. When it was time for Donna to leave Aspen after that trip, she got up early to take the bus to the airport. Michele was sleeping in another room so Donna packed as quietly as she could and left. She didn’t want to say goodbye.
Blood splatter evidence from the Andrews murder scene. Photo courtesy of the Napa County District Attorney’s Office.
Answering those questions was tasked to Napa police detectives John Bailey and Robert Jarecki. Thanks to Luce, suspicion immediately centered on the flirtatious man at the end of the bar. But who was he?
Luce and his two friends told police he was a stranger and they’d never seen him before. Just a drifter. But others thought the description of the suspect sounded like a welder Anita knew. And still others thought it described the boyfriend who worked for the carnival.
As the detectives chased each lead, they were unaware that the drifter-welder-carnival worker might all be one and the same man. This was in part because Andrews’ daughter, Donna Hawkins, didn’t tell them about the last time she’d talked to her mother on the telephone.
Hawkins, 23 years old and living in Walnut Creek about twenty-five miles away, had spoken to Andrews a week earlier when Hawkins called to a cancel a dinner date. During the conversation, her mom said she was fed up with her sometimes boyfriend, a mechanic who worked for a traveling carnival. Anita said he’d run up a $400 telephone bill at her apartment. He’d left his tools in the back of her Cadillac, but she wasn’t giving them back until he paid her.
In addition to the telephone call between Andrews and Hawkins, the aftermath surrounding the murder of Anita Andrews was filled with other what-ifs. What if the night patrolman hadn’t missed his pass by the bar and noticed that the padlock was missing on the door but the Cadillac was gone? He might have discovered Andrews’ body many hours earlier and, perhaps, the killer wouldn’t have had such a head start.
And Andrews’ former neighbor, Joseph Silva, who was supposed to go out to dinner with her the night before, wondered what if he’d stopped by for a drink. He may have stayed and escorted Anita to her car, or discouraged the killer just with his presence. But he hadn’t and it haunted him. As the investigation wore on without any apparent progress, he and a friend even checked out the parking lots at the Oakland and San Francisco airports looking for her Cadillac.
Bailey and Jarecki canvassed the neighborhood, asking if anybody had noticed anything, or anyone unusual. They scoured records of other rapes, robberies and murders to see if they could find anything that look similar to what happened at Fagiani’s.
They came up with one name, Liston Beal. He’d checked into the Connor Hotel on July 10 and then checked out the next morning and left town. The hotel manager thought Beal had been acting weird when he checked out.
Even Luce and his friends were potential suspects. They’d been at the bar. Maybe they’d made up the stranger to cover themselves. But their stories checked out.
There was so little to go on. Those were the days before computers would make it easier for law enforcement agencies to share or receive information, so it was a month before the Napa detectives learned there was a hit on Andrews’ credit card. Sometime before midnight on the night of the murder, a tan Cadillac pulled into a Sacramento truck stop off Highway 99, sixty miles northwest of Napa.
Paul Griener was the attendant on duty when the driver asked politely for ten dollars worth of gas. As he filled the tank, the 36-year-old Griener noticed a purse on the back seat and that the driver had covered his lap with a blue towel that appeared to be stained with blood. Why the towel, he thought and considered asking. But the driver didn’t seem nervous; in fact, he would describe the driver to police as “calm, cool and collected.”
So Griener let it go. Nor did he balk when the driver gave him a credit card with a woman’s name on it. The man said it was his wife’s card and signed it “A.E. Andrews” before pulling out and heading south.[1]
However, where the driver went was anybody’s guess. The Cadillac disappeared and never would be located.
After nearly two months of intense investigation, the Napa detectives had to admit that the case had gone stone cold dead. The evidence—a few bottles with fingerprints they couldn’t match to anyone, a cigarette butt from the ashtray, broken glass from the bottle she’d been struck with, a towel the killer left on the floor of the storeroom, the murder weapon, a copy of the gas station receipt from Sacramento, and some photographs—was stored to await a break in the case.
[1] Sam Whiting, “Napa Bar Is a Reminder of Old Murder,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 17, 1989
III
August 30, 1974
Six weeks later after the murder of Anita Andrews and 1100 miles to the east, Michele Wallace was trudging down a gravel road beneath a backpack containing her sleeping bag, camping equipment, and her most prized possession, a 35 mm camera. Okie, her black, German shepherd dog, paced alongside laden with his own saddle pack. The 25-year-old woman was returning from a Labor Day weekend of hiking in a mountainous area of south-central Colorado known as Schofield Park.
As she walked, she must have had mixed feelings: a little melancholy, perhaps, about her plans to soon leave the mountains she loved, but also excited about the future. Earlier that summer, she had driven from South Carolina, where she had been photographing a rare bird species on the remote barrier islands, to her hometown of Chicago for her brother George Jr.’s wedding. There she regaled her family and friends, such as her best friend Donna Campeglia, with tales of her latest adventure—camping in the marshlands for a week waiting for a nest of eggs to hatch, covering the lower portions of her legs with tin cans as an improvised defense against rattlesnakes.
“She’s got more balls than I ever had,’’ her father, George Sr., remarked to his wife, Maggie, as they shook their heads and laughed over Michele’s escapades.
At 5-feet-6 and 120 pounds, and much stronger than she appeared though a recent broken collarbone still bothered her. She seemed fearless to her friends and family. She’d once taken a job exercising polo ponies for a Chicago club, dashing full tilt across the fields. Later, she worked on a ranch, helping castrate young bulls at roundup time. She took up rock climbing and tried skydiving. She enrolled in martial arts classes. There was nothing a boy could do, her father boasted to friends, that she couldn’t.
In her mid-20s, Michele was also a beautiful young woman, with rich chocolate eyes and delicate features. She often wore her long, dark hair in two thick braids.
Michele Wallace was 25 years old when she disappeared. Photo courtesy of Donna Campeglia.
At her brother’s wedding, Michele told her parents that she would be moving on to Colorado to spend the rest of the summer taking photographs of the Rocky Mountains. Then in the fall, she would return to North Carolina for her first professional photography assignment, chronicling the lives of the people who lived deep in the mountains there.
It was an isolated, backward world where moonshiners still plied their trade and the locals mistrusted strangers, she said, but she wasn’t worried about her own safety. Highways and housing developments were pushing ever closer to their homes, and soon the hill people would be carried away by the tide of civilization. She wanted to make a record “before they’re gone.” Her idea was good enough to win her a government grant, but first she wanted to spend the summer in the mountains of Colorado.
So Michele moved to Gunnison, a small town with about 3,500 residents, in Gunnison County. It wasn’t hard to see why: The town was surrounded by some of the most beautiful and rugged country in all of Colorado. It was set in a wide valley through which the Gunnison River flowed. The valley floor was covered with miles of scrubby, knee-high brush and stunted juniper trees interspersed with the cultivated fields of working ranches. Enormous cottonwood trees lined the banks of the river.
In the mountains, however, the landscape changed dramatically. Rangeland and cottonwoods gave way to steep, rocky slopes blanketed by forests thick with pine, fir, and groves of quaking aspen. The area was a Mecca for fishermen and hunters, who every fall more than doubled Gunnison County’s population as they traipsed about the hills dressed in fluorescent orange. It was also a magnet for young people drawn to the area’s outdoor recreational activities, including nearby Crested Butte ski area, 28 miles north of Gunnison.
Michele fit right in with the outdoor enthusiasts. She was well liked if somewhat quiet. A few of her acquaintances later said they thought of her as lonely, or lost, as if constantly searching for something. But their perceptions may have been clouded by hindsight because in 1974, Michele Wallace had her whole life to look forward to. Her parents had bought her the red 1973 Mazda station wagon with the South Carolina license plates, and her father paid for the insurance. Otherwise she supported herself that summer by working as a flagger for a highway construction crew.
It was how she met her roommate, Theresa Erikson, another flagger. The two young women and Okie moved into a house that had been converted into apartments across the street from the Gunnison County courthouse.
Michele had acquired the dog, named for the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia, fully grown a year earlier. He was something of an enigma; he could be fiercely protective of his mistress or docile as a lamb. If young men came to visit, Okie usually went berserk. The girls had to chain him in the backyard or lock him in the kitchen, where he would continue to snarl and try to get back to Michele for as long as the visitor remained. When Michele visited her family in Chicago for her brother’s wedding, he bristled if her father gave her a hug. However, when Michele and Okie visited the home of Theresa’s parents in Montrose, some forty miles west of Gunnison, the dog took to Theresa’s father like an old friend.
Near the end of August, Michele called her mother. Theresa was going out of town to a wedding, and Michele had decided to take a backpacking trip. It would be her last chance before she left for North Carolina. Michele informed her mother that she was leaving on the twenty-seventh. She said she might not return until September 2, but not to worry; she was taking Okie with her and would be careful. “I’ll call you as soon as I get back,” she promised.
Some parents might have worried, but the Wallaces believed that their daughter knew how to take care of herself. Michele was well aware that the mountains could be dangerous, especially for someone alone and beyond help in case of an accident. She minimized the risks by letting people know where she was going, as well as when she expected to get back. She also had top-flight camping equipment and a large dog for protection.
Michele had a number of nearby areas to choose from for her trip. Fate, however, took her to Schofield Park, another ten miles beyond Crested Butte. Arriving in the area, she parked her car near the town of Gothic, a biological research station inhabited by only a few people, and walked a mile or so up the road to where a hiking trail began. She spent the next three days hiking and taking photographs: photographs of the mountains; photographs of Okie with his red dog pack; photographs of wildflowers and mountain wildlife.
On the fourth day, August 30, a Friday, Michele decided she was ready to return to Gunnison and, in a few short weeks, get on with the rest of her life. She packed her gear, settled Okie’s pack on him, and strapped into her own for the march back to her car.
Michele’s dog, Okie, was shot by a rancher after her disappearance. Photo taken by Michele Wallace
It was late afternoon when she reached the trailhead and the road to Gothic. As she left the trail, a beat-up car came wheezing up to her and stopped. Two men were inside. The driver offered her a beer.
Hot and grubby from her days in the mountains, Michele smiled and reached for the offered bottle. Not much of a drinker, she took only a sip before handing it back.
“We’re only going up the road a bit and will be back in a few minutes if you want a ride,” the driver told her.
“That’d be great,” she said and waved as they chugged off.
A few minutes later, the men were back. A tire was going flat, they said, but they would probably make it to Gothic if she still wanted a ride. Michelle and Okie jumped in the back.
They had hardly gone a hundred yards when there was a loud clang. The driver got out and looked under the car. He got back in proclaiming it just wasn’t his day; a rock had punched a hole in his oil pan. They all laughed. “How about I give you a ride when we get to Gothic?” Michele offered.
When they reached her car, the driver of the other vehicle got in the backseat with Okie. He looked like a ranch hand, tanned and weathered beyond his years. “I’m Chuck,” he said.
“And I’m Roy,” the other man added as he climbed in. He was the taller of the two and not bad-looking, even if his dishwater blond hair was thinning as he approached middle age. He smiled and shut the door, and said, “Thanks for the lift.”
On the way back to Gunnison, Chuck made friends with the dog, who licked his face and then drooled on his lap for most of the trip. Roy and the girl were talking up front, but he couldn’t hear much of what was said.
It was early evening when they arrived back in Gunnison outside the Columbine Bar. Chuck was surprised to hear Roy ask the girl if she would mind driving him a few blocks to his truck.
That’s strange, Chuck thought; I didn’t know he had a truck.” They’d been driving around, goofing off and boozing it up mostly, in his old rattletrap for two days since meeting in the Columbine. He thought about not letting the girl go off alone with Roy, but whiskey called so he decided he needed a drink more than he needed to be chivalrous.
Roy stepped out of the car to let Chuck exit. “I’ll be back in a bit,” he said to his confused drinking buddy; then he got back in the girl’s car. It would several weeks before the two men would see each other again and under much different circumstances.
Michele Wallace, on the other hand, was never seen alive again.[1]
[1] Steve Jackson, No Stone Unturned (WildBluePress, May 2015), Kindle Edition
IV
September 2, 1974
The fear in Margaret Wallace’s voice was palpable. “Have you heard from Michele,” she asked. “She always calls on Sunday, but she didn’t call. And now it’s Monday.”
Donna Campeglia didn’t know quite how to respond. Her best friend, her spiritual twin, Michele Wallace was living in Gunnison, Colorado, a long ways from Riverside, Illinois and they hadn’t talked in a month. They mostly wrote letters and the last she’d heard Michele was excited to be living in the mountains and happy to have a job working for a highway crew.
It was unusual for Michele to miss her weekly check in with her mother. Still, Donna wasn’t terribly alarmed; her friend tended to march to her own drummer and there were all sorts of plausible reasons she’d missed her call. For instance, Michele was always trekking around in the mountains with her dog, she could have met up with some other campers and decided to spend an extra couple of days exploring. Or maybe she was dating a new guy and was head-over-heels and not thinking about needing to call her mom. Or, well to be honest, Michele could be something of a “space cadet” and just forgot.
Other than her mom, nobody knew Michele better than Donna. They met when they were 13 years old in the girls’ bathroom at Riverside Middle School as they were applying fresh mascara side-by-side at the mirror. It was ironic that Michele who would come to epitomize the Earth Mother-type, applied makeup when she was a teenager as though her life depended on it. “I have to go apply the plastic surgery,” she’d say and away they’d head for the mirrors.
From the day they met, they were rarely apart. The two girls looked alike with soulful brown eyes and dark hair. Their birthdays were six days apart—Michele’s was April 13 and Donna’s the 19th—and kindred spirits. Donna was more gregarious, while Michele was content with Donna’s friendship and that of their other best friend, Kathy Pransky. But with Donna driving, Michele was always up for an adventure or a party as long as they were together. She was what Donna’s thought of as “a real Good-Time Charlie,” always smiling, always joking, rarely serious.
They lived in a community where nothing bad ever happened; at least not of the criminal sort. Donna and her parents were in Riverside, a designed community known for its many parks and winding tree-lined streets. Michele, her parents, and brother George Jr. lived in North Riverside which wasn’t quite as fairytale-like but she was right across the street from a forest preserve where she’d walk her dog—she always had a dog—without fear any time of the day or night.
After high school, Michele had been off to see the world while Donna got a job. Over the next few years, they’d see each other when Michele came home from wherever she had been living—Spain, Utah, or beloved mountains in Colorado. Or Donna would go see her. When Donna began vagabonding herself and went to live in Florida for a little while, “Mush” as she was known to family and friends, visited her. And in between they wrote dozens of letters.
There was something unsettled about Michele, as though she was always searching for something. Once when Donna was visiting her friend in Aspen, Colorado, Michele’s boyfriend, a Frenchman named Gerard summed it up. “Michele you are never present,” he said. “When you’re eating you’re thinking of going for a walk; when you’re walking you’re thinking of being somewhere else. You’re always dreaming of something.”
Such comments didn’t bother Michele. She’d just smile and go on dreaming.
The hardest part about visiting her for Donna was when they had to part. It was always a scene with both of them in tears. When it was time for Donna to leave Aspen after that trip, she got up early to take the bus to the airport. Michele was sleeping in another room so Donna packed as quietly as she could and left. She didn’t want to say goodbye.
